Tag Archives: Brexit

The emergence of a new conservative movement in the Western world in the 21st century has been one of the most important political developments of our time. But despite the way that this movement has influenced recent elections and produced shocking results like Trump and Brexit, the grand majority of people still fail to understand how and where it emerged. Ever since Hillary Clinton first spelled out the “alt-right” in a campaign speech in 2016, this term has been used as a catch-all for all right-wing politicians and pundits that have pursued a populist, anti-establishment rhetoric but this too proven to be far too limiting in scope for understanding the breadth of the movement. It also ignores that many of the people pushing the movement’s ideas don’t identify with the alt-right, aren’t anti-establishment, and may even be coming from the left itself.

I have therefore created a convenient infographic on what I call the New Right Ecosystem: the assortment of communities that are supporting the New Right movement. Some are obvious, like the original alt-right, the men’s rights activists, or the troll and meme armies that proliferate on forums such as 4chan. Many of these were mentioned in a seminal 2016 Breitbart piece co-authored by who was then the rising superstar of the alt-right, Milo Yiannopolous. But over the past decade even other communities that once appeared to embrace left-wing values have shifted squarely into the Trump camp, as is the case with the New Atheist and skeptic communities that initially arose to combat religious fundamentalism of all kinds in the post-9/11 Bush years. Finally, others like the libertarians are using the New Right as a platform to pursue their free market agendas. The fact that nearly all alt-right and anti-establishment pundits refer to themselves as libertarians or “classic liberals” (an increasingly used euphemism for libertarian sympathies) is telling of how nationalism and market fundamentalism have formed a strange and toxic marriage.

I am confident that the infographic is mostly self-explanatory after reading the legends. However, this post will serve as a basic F.A.Q., with more analysis coming in future posts. Continue reading →

Dear world, on behalf of economists I offer an apology. More than anything or anyone else, we are responsible for the clusterfuck that has been 2016.

Since the 1980s we said that inequality didn’t matter. That working and middle class people would be fine if their incomes didn’t worsen even as those in the top 10% (and especially 1%) saw their own income and wealth skyrocket to levels not seen since the Gilded Age. We did not see that people did not view their lot in absolute but in relative terms. We expected them to accept our logic, and acted dumbfounded when they didn’t express gratitude for the few tiny drops of prosperity that trickled down. We never imagined that they’d be rightfully pissed. Then we blamed them for living beyond their means to catch up with the Joneses, for being irresponsible for maxing their credit cards and taking out mortgages on houses they couldn’t afford. We never saw inequality as a psychological problem as much as an economic one.

We called anyone who disagreed a socialist.

Around that same time, we said that free markets were a panacea for growth. True, many countries did benefit heavily from globalization and certainly those countries that did not follow certain basic rules of market logic have fared terribly (Venezuela being a case in point). But globalization was not a panacea for the working and middle classes of the developed world. In our smugness, we said that the lost jobs either to China, Mexico, or technology were a necessary evil for continued productivity growth. We acted like it was their fault that they did not have the skills needed for the new economy, and that it was nobody’s responsibility to find them those skills either. In the dog eat dog world of neoliberal economics there are losers, and we could afford not to be those losers becomes economists are still not being outsourced to India or replaced by robots so we had little empathy for those who were less lucky. We applauded that unemployment fell and didn’t care that it was because people lost stable, salaried jobs and became self-employed with zero benefits. We cared more about the Dow Jones than the Gini index.

We called anyone who disagreed a socialist.

We also assumed that everyone was rational. We even had a name for this species of humanity that always took decisions based on all available information, weighed all options, and picked the one that maximized their utility: homo economicus. Since we thought psychology, sociology, and all the other social sciences were inferior disciplines because they could not prove their hypotheses with econometrics, so we never bothered to accept their insights into human behavior. The result is that we thought markets were self-correcting, industries were self-regulated, and markets punished those who took decisions against the public interest. We saw the “irrational exuberance” of the dot-com bubble and then did nothing when a bigger bubble, the subprime housing bubble, sprung up almost immediately after the first one popped.

We called anyone who disagreed a socialist.

And finally, we assumed we had all the answers. We took the view of Noble laureate Robert Lucas that the “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades”. This was just five years before the global financial crisis. We also poisoned the minds of politicians, who adopted our elegant yet simplistic neoclassical view of how the world worked. We flooded bookstores with titles like Freakonomics and The Economic Naturalist: How Economics Explains Everything to educate the masses on why we knew better. We were conceited, arrogant, and frankly, fucking annoying.

We called anyone who disagreed a socialist.

Then on June 23rd we wondered how the British could be so stupid as to want to leave the EU. On November 8th we were even more perplexed on how Americans could be dumb enough to vote for someone like Trump. From our little intellectual ivory towers, the framework in which we understood the world was perfectly fine. We didn’t get that we didn’t get it.

And now with the twin shocks of a global crisis in 2008-09 and a political crisis in 2016, our world has been shattered. Probably irremediably. But we don’t know it yet. This will still be blamed on people (deplorable as they may be), rather than the structures that conditioned them to be that way. And we’ll be scratching our heads into oblivion by failing to understand why a laid off steelworker from Pennsylvania or miner from Yorkshire won’t be voting with rapturous joy for the man or woman who promises free trade agreements, minority rights, and open immigration in place of the only thing that really matters to them: dignity.

(The author wishes to note that he has stood against everything that has been criticized in this piece since his days as an undergrad. And if you think he is a socialist, well, you’re pretty much the type of person he wrote this for)

I am perhaps the most unlikely of persons to care about the upcoming Brexit referendum on June 23rd. First of all, I am a foreign national here by will rather than by need, which means that if a post-Brexit Britain doesn’t suit my fancy, I can flee this island in a heartbeat. I am also a UK resident, which means that I am not going to get kicked out in case your side wins. In other words, I’m pretty much immune and indifferent to the whole thing although I definitely side with the Remain camp for the simple reason that I prefer reason, logic, and facts over ignorant or self-deluded sentimentality.

Now, I am directing this little essay not to the vile, racist scum that conform part – but not all – of your ranks. Not all of you vote UKIP, or are members of the EDL or Britain First although the moral laxity which allows you to side with these people without feeling revulsion is frightening. It is not a feeling that I could possibly identify with since I cannot find a single political or ethical issue where I would be at ease in being on the same side of the fence as these people. It therefore makes me wonder whether the frustration and rage of a Remain win on Thursday will be the remaining trigger to cross the event horizon of fascism, an ideological black hole in which civility no longer can escape. You may loathe to be associated with these scumbags, but knowingly or not, you’re on the same track and riding in the same direction.

So you “moderate” Brexiteer, the kind who argues that he/she is 40% Remain and 60% Leave or some variation of this, I will only pose one single question for you to consider before heading to the polls on Thursday. No, it’s about any numbers or statistics; I know you have surrendered to emotion and no amount of facts will convince you otherwise. In fact, I find it cringe-worthy that at this stage some otherwise reasonable people still think that pointing out “the truth” and barraging their Facebook and Twitter feeds with fact-memes or Guardian articles serves any argumentative value (if anything it’s counterproductive and leading you to entrench your views further). Rather, It’s a very simple logical question and I venture to guess that you won’t have an answer for it. Name me a single EU-related grievance that you are using to justify your Leave vote that could not have been addressed and corrected by an appropriate British government policy.